Tag Archive for: Google

The 5 Most Common Mistakes on Landing Pages

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You can do a lot of different things with landing pages, be it selling something, encouraging visitors to subscribe to a newsletter, or trying to get people to sign a petition. No matter which of these goals you have, you are ultimately trying to get visitors to perform an action.

Making a great landing page seems like it should be easy, but it is more complex than you may think. This leads to poor sales because a landing page is only working if it is getting people to convert.

With that in mind, let’s examine the most common problems with landing pages.

  1. Mismatching Text Ad Copy and Landing Page Headline – There are numerous reasons you should make sure your Google AdWords text ads match your landing page headline. For users, the text ad creates an expectation, and you don’t want to confuse your visitors or make them feel mislead. The quality of your landing page also decides cost-per-click in AdWords, so if you raise your quality score, you will lower your cost-per-click.
  2. Poor Grammar and Misspelled Words – Throwing up a quick landing page is always a terrible idea because it leads to a ton of smaller problems. One of those is bad spelling and grammar. This is one of those mistakes that just shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Your visitors will take any reason you give them to not convert, and this one is a big reason to leave.
  3. No Trust Signals – To get visitors to convert, you have to establish trust. You can build this into your landing page in just a few ways. If you establish your brand’s popularity, people will view it as credible. You can also present your 3rd party certifications with organizations like Verisign or the Better Business Bureau. You can also establish trust by making positive mentions of your brand in the press easily available on the landing page.
  4. Lack of Good Call-to-Actions – You’re call to actions are important to help make people convert. They should also be compelling, with practical language, and solid, consistent design. You should also keep it short, between 90 and 150 characters. You need to make it clear what you want the visitor to do, but short enough to keep their attention.
  5. Poor Quality Videos or Images – Videos on your landing page can help boost conversion rates by about 80%. Images don’t raise conversions that much, but they still have their own positive effect on visitor activity. This doesn’t mean you can just toss up any image or video you want however. Poor quality images or videos will actually lower conversion rates rather than improve them.

Eric Siu from Unbounce has even more common mistakes, but these will help get you started with making sure users are converting. Remember, if users aren’t converting, your landing page has problems.

 

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Don’t Scare Away Customers By Over Marketing

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There are so many options to personalize and remarket ads to your potential customers online, you may actually be annoying those consumers and driving them away. No one wants to see ads tailored to them on every site they visit, all asking them to come back and buy a product they browsed for hours ago.

So, David Rodnitzky put together a list at Search Engine Land, which should help you be a fine-tuned marketer, not an annoying, stalker type. Here’s a look:

1. Attribution

Because you’re using so many vehicles to get your message across, you need to know which ones are working and how well they’re working. Attribution tracking allows you to discover how a consumer got to your site, but it’s a pricey service.

2. Frequency Caps

You can use the attribution data to find out what is superfluous in your advertising strategy. Limit the number of times users see your ads on a given channel based on how well those ads work and how they work in combination with your other campaigns.

3. Change your creative

With the data you’re collecting, you can discover what stage users typically are when they see specific ads. Use that knowledge to tailor your ads content and message. Ads for users who are early in the process can be about awareness, while ads for users later in their shopping process can be focused on conversions.

4. Risk v Reward

Consider how many consumers you will alienate with ads when looking at how many more conversions you could get. If you run some ads more to get a slight increase in conversions, you may also be increasing the number of consumers who swear off your site because of over-bearing ads.

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Adwords Will Soon ‘Optimize for Conversions’ By Default

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Adwords is making some dramatic changes once again. In October, Google brought back the ‘Rotate Indefinitely’ option for campaigns even though they didn’t recommend the option themselves. Now, Google will be making campaigns not set to ‘rotate indefinitely’ default to ‘optimize for conversions’.

As posted to the iNeedHits blog, Google estimates the change will increase conversions by 5-percent across the board. With the ‘optimize for conversions’ option, Google will dynamically change bids from advertisers to run ads with the greatest chance of creating a conversion.

Users who prefer to ‘optimize’ manually can do so by using the ‘Conversion Optimizer’ and ‘Enhanced CPC’ tools, which can track advertising bids likely to lead to conversion and ensure ads with high chances of conversion are being shown the most without an increse in budget.

Google will make the change the week of November 12th. This means that you’ll need to do your homework before then to make sure your campaigns aren’t automatically switched to something you don’t want.

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Matt Cutts Says Google Now Reports 100 Percent of Manual Actions

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Have you ever wondered if your site was penalized by Google through automated algorithms or a real human person? Now, you will almost always know because Google reports almost 100 percent of manual penalties.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, described this new policy at Pubcon this year, saying, “We’ve actually started to send messages for pretty much every manual action that we do that will directly impact the ranking of your site.”

“If there’s some manual action taken by the manual web spam team that means your web site is going to rank directly lower in the search results, we’re telling webmasters about pretty much all of those situations.”

Cutts did clarify that there may be rare instances where this doesn’t occur, but their aim to get to 100-percent.

In June, at SMX Advanced, Cutts gave a figure of 99 percent reporting, but Cutt believes they are currently reporting every instance of manual actions.

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land has more information about the distinction between manual and algorithmic actions.

 

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Split-Testing Can Optimize Your AdWords Campaigns

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There are certainly times when you have too many options. Specifically, I’m talking about you AdWords campaigns. Making the right choices could potentially mean netting thousands of additional users. Thanks to split-testing, you can be more certain that you’re running the most effective campaign possible.

Split-testing is simple enough. Essentially, you run the campaign as is, and you also run it with one elemental change. Both ads are randomly displayed to users and eventually, over thousands of views, you discover which is more effective.

You change in your campaign can be a variety of things. Maybe the two ads being split-tested are drastically different in color, text or another way. Or, the ads could direct users to different landing pages.

To achieve your split-test, you’ll need to set AdWords to rotate your ads evenly. This may not be as effective as the ‘optimize for clicks’ option that AdWords suggests, but for the sake of testing it’s the only way to get real results.

Alistair Dent details the split-testing strategy at Search Engine Watch. Essentially, you should set aside one campaign strictly for split-testing, which allows your other campaigns to capitalize on what is already working. Copy the campaign you wish to improve into the split-test campaign, then turn it off in the main campaign.

Remember, it will take time and thousands of users to minimize potential variables, so don’t rush through the testing phase. If you are patient, you’ll get a clear answer on how to tweak your campaign.

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Possible Ex-Google Employee Offers Insights

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Andre Weyher worked on Google’s Search Quality/Webspam team for two years, according to his LinkedIn profile. Recently, he spoke with James Norquay, a digital/search marketer from Australia, offering insight that possibly could help search marketers and web marketers understand Google’s SEO strategies.

Since Matt McGee published his initial report on Weyher’s comments on Search Engine Land, Google has released a short statement denying Weyher worked on webspam engineering or algorithms, but Weyher stands by his statements.

According to Weyher, everyone on the search quality team covers a specific “market” and his was content quality and backlink profiles.

Speaking about the Penguin update, Weyher says, “Everyone knew that Penguin would be pointed at links, but I don’t think many people expected the impact to be as large as it turned out to be. At this stage a webmaster is out of his mind to still rely on techniques that were common practice 8 months ago.”

He emphasizes the shift to anchor text ratios, which has been a frequent piece of SEO advice following the Penguin update. His statement could confirm Google’s perspective on anchor text ratios.

If Weyher’s statements are to be believed, they could be a source of great insight into Google’s SEO strategies. However, even if you take Weyher’s words as truth, he would have been just one member of Google’s huge team, which he confirms when he says in his defense of the original interview, “No one within Google knows the entire picture apart from maybe 1 engineer, 1 level under Larry Page.”

 

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Call Reporting Now Available to AdWords Express Users

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Smart phone

The full version of AdWords has included the ability to track phone calls generated from ads for two years. TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois reports that, beginning last week, AdWords Express, a simplified version for small businesses, included that option as well.

Call reporting is similar to reporting on clicks your ad generates. For every consumer that uses your ad to contact you, Google tracks and stores that information so you can see how effective the complete performance of your ad has been.

Google actually routes these calls through their own toll-free number, using Google Voice technology, and then forwards them on to your business. This way, they can track the calls and charge your AdWords account the same way they do for each click.

Google has hinted that they will accept bids for higher cost-per-call ads, which would get those ads higher placement, but that option has not yet been made a reality.

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Coming Soon: AdWords Style Ads to Your TV

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TV

Imagine seeing AdWords style ads displayed on your TV during your favorite show. The idea isn’t as far away as you might think.

A startup called The Compass Group LLC is working on a way for advertisers to create text overlay ads, which could appear any time on any participating station. This would lower the cost of television advertising and allow small businesses to put their ads in places they never could’ve afforded.

Essentially, TV stations would allocate space on the screen and times when ads could be placed, much like a website allocating space for ads, which are then filled by AdWords. Users would then be able to creat their specific ad and choose when they’d like to run it. This streamlines the process, making it almost entirely user-generated and automated.

The one possible hang-up that has yet to be adderessed is whether or not the public, which is not used to seeing this type of advertising on TV, will respond to the ads. In general, more advertising on TV is usually met with some hositility.

Advertisement Journal has more on The Compass Group LLC.

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10 New AdWords Features to Watch For

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As with any Google service, AdWords is constantly innovating and improving. Lisa Raehsler recently put out her list of the 10 best recent AdWords improvements at Search Engine Watch.

1. Media Ads

This one hasn’t been fully made available yet, but could be huge for certain businesses. The ad includes two links, one to a landing page and one to a relevant video, which is expandable from the ad.

2. Product Listings

These ads are linked to a Google Merchant account and show your product to users searching for a relevant keyword. Also currently in limited release.

3. Enhance Sitelinks

New sitelinks are larger and actually appear like regular ads, but they’re connected to one closely related ‘umbrella’ ad. CTR have reportedly significantly improved with the enhancement.

4. Remarketing

Currently in beta testing, advertisers will soon have the opportunity to use a consumers previous search for keywords to show them relevant ads on subsequent searches.

5. Offers extensions

Ads and offers combined. Your specfic promotion or coupon is included with your ad and can be saved to a Google offers account.

6. Reminder extensions

Users can send themselves an email from your ad reminding them about a sale, opening or special. Just started in beta.

7. Remarketing in Analytics

Build targeting lists in analytics using a variety of factors, including referral source or the site the user came from. These lists are easily integrated in AdWords.

8. Dynamic Display

Target specific users based on their activity or websites based on their audience. Display ads will link with a Merchant account to show your relevant products.

9. Comparison ads

It’s a cost-per-lead model that does just what it sounds like. Compare your prices to other companies. This one may be a long way from full release, but it’s being tested on financial companies.

10.  App promotion

Advertise your app to app users. AdWords does most of the work here providing the graphics, formatting and updating the rating ad reviews.

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What You Need To Know About Google’s Disavow Links Tool

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I recently wrote about the release of Google’s Disavow Links tool, but there are some more questions popping up that need answering. So, let’s cover a little bit more about the tool.

First off, the tool does not immediately take effect. This is one of many reasons Google suggests publishers try to remove questionable links first by working with site owners hosting links, or companies that they may have purchased links through.

Instead of disavowing the links immediately, “it can take weeks for that to go into effect,” said Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team at a keynote during the Pubcon conference. Google also has reserved the right to not use submissions if it feels they are questionable.

It is important to be accurate when making your file to submit to Google. Because of the delay in processing the file, it may take another few weeks to “reavow” links you didn’t mean to discount.

Once you have submitted a file to Google, you can download it, change it, and then resubmit.

The tool is mainly designed for site owners affected by the Penguin Update, which was focused on hitting sites that may have purchased links or gained them through spamming. Before, Google ignored bad links, but now they act as a negative mark against the site.

This change prompted fear in some of the SEO industry that site owners would create bad links pointing to their site, or “negative SEO.” This tool helps to ensure that negative SEO is not a worry by allowing you to disavow any of those types of links.

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land has even more information about the tool, and Matt Cutts has a 10 minute long video answering questions.

 

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